Greater Atlanta
In the spirit of counterbalancing my 'we are all doomed' posts on civic design and community planning, let me say this: there's some interesting stuff going on in the greater Atlanta area.
Some time ago, I put up a post about my favorite restaurants and how they create or tie together a Main Street or downtown area. So imagine my delight on Sunday when I was introduced to the Virginia Highlands neighborhood of Atlanta!
Everything in this neighborhood is on a human scale, and as a result you see people walking everywhere (mostly fit-looking people, I should add). The restaurants - two Thai places on one block! - and bars abut the sidewalk directly, with windows on the streetscape. The main roadways are the same as any you'd see in small-town America: two-lane traffic and low speed limits. The zoning district, such as I could gather, appeared to be multi-use residential and commercial. In general, a very pleasant place to be.
So that's my next challenge to our readers and commenters: let's go beyond hyping our favorite restaurants and promote neighborhoods and places we've been to whose overall character and design are worth exporting elsewhere (admittedly somewhat derivative of the Project for Public Spaces, but it's my post and I'll do what I like!). Any takers? posted by Joshua @ 5:51 PM
2 Comments:
I've personally always loved the "Deep Ellum" part of Dallas. It's name comes from old black slang and pronunciations from the thirties, wherein the waydowntown part of Elm Street, where all the old jazz clubs were, became known as Deep Ellum, and the name stuck enough that it became official.
Nowadays, Deep Ellum still looks like an industrial wasteland, but plays home to the coolest nightspots in all of Texas (indluding Austin. In fact, some might say that Austin is just trying to be a cty-wide version of Deep Ellum.)
In Dallas, which may be even more auto-centic than Houston, which is more auto-centric than L.A., everybody drives their cars to one of the many parking lots and just walkds around. The nightlife is lively, to say the least, comprising the youth of the city at their best, and worst. And as there are no residences in the hood, nobody complains about the noise.
Essentially, it's like if you took the Bedford area of Brooklyn and replaced all the places like Sea with more North Sixes, and all the hipsters with genuine party-hard outcasts. This might not seem like the type of thing to appeal to such a fundamentally conservative town, but just ask anyone from Dallas abnout Trees or the Gypsy Tea Room. You won't have to make another contribution to the conversation all night.
It's more of a town than a neighborhood, but I fell in love with Santa Fe, NM while there last summer. Many of the downtown buildings are the original, 300-year-old adobe which have barely aged. There's a ton of good restaurants, coffee shops, and jewelry stores, and since it's so compact driving in the downtown area is discouraged. That's an attitude that you rarely find in the SUV-happy Southwest. It helped that we were there during the largest Native American art festival in the country, which takes over the entire downtown.
On a side note, I find any college town outside of major cities to be great places to walk around and feel like part of a community. My sister goes to U. of Illinois in Champaign. While the town issurrounded by corn and soy fields for 100 miles in every direction, Champaign is an adorable town with an art house theater, antique stores, and a Big Ten football field. What else could you ask for?
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